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A cardinal question is where we are to place the freedom of
action ascribed to us.
It must be founded in impulse or in some appetite, as when we act
or omit in lust or rage or upon some calculation of advantage
accompanied by desire.
But if rage or desire implied freedom we must allow freedom to
animals, infants, maniacs, the distraught, the victims of
malpractice producing incontrollable delusions. And if freedom
turns on calculation with desire, does this include faulty
calculation? Sound calculation, no doubt, and sound desire; but
then comes the question whether the appetite stirs the
calculation or the calculation the appetite.
Where the appetites are dictated by the very nature they are the
desires of the conjoint of soul and body and then soul lies under
physical compulsions: if they spring in the soul as an
independent, then much that we take to be voluntary is in reality
outside of our free act. Further, every emotion is preceded by
some meagre reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an
appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave us
masters in the ensuing act? Need, inexorably craving
satisfaction, is not free in face of that to which it is forced:
and how at all can a thing have efficiency of its own when it
rises from an extern, has an extern for very principle, thence
taking its Being as it stands? It lives by that extern, lives as
it has been moulded: if this be freedom, there is freedom in even
the soulless; fire acts in accordance with its characteristic
being.
We may be reminded that the Living Form and the soul know what
they do. But, if this is knowledge by perception, it does not
help towards the freedom of the act; perception gives awareness,
not mastery: if true knowing is meant, either this is the knowing
of something happening- once more awareness- with the motive-
force still to seek, or the reasoning and knowledge have acted to
quell the appetite; then we have to ask to what this repression
is to be referred and where it has taken place. If it is that the
mental process sets up an opposing desire we must assure
ourselves how; if it merely stills the appetite with no further
efficiency and this is our freedom, then freedom does not depend
upon act but is a thing of the mind- and in truth all that has to
do with act, the very most reasonable, is still of mixed value
and cannot carry freedom.
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